


Never Did Run Smooth

by rain_sleet_snow



Series: My Family (And Other Dinosaurs) [31]
Category: Primeval
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-02-01
Updated: 2009-02-01
Packaged: 2018-03-10 00:15:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,291
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3269603
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rain_sleet_snow/pseuds/rain_sleet_snow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Liz has a memory like a steel trap when she’s not dealing with her mother, so she has to have deliberately ignored the date. Right?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Never Did Run Smooth

            They shared Geography, but the teacher was inflicting a mock exam paper on his students and no talking was allowed. The next lesson was English, and the class was making little speeches to the class, and since there were twenty-three of them, there were a lot of little speeches to get through and no spare time for chatter. Then it was Maths, and Juliet wasn’t even in the same set as Liz, so they were in different rooms and there was no way they could talk – and Liz had apparently made the unprecedented move of following the rules about pupils’ mobiles and switching her phone off or leaving it in her locker, because she didn’t answer Juliet’s texts. Juliet thought they might have a decent chance of talking in lunchtime, and was waiting impatiently for the chance to demand an explanation of Liz’s behaviour, but Liz paid her no attention whatsoever, disappearing from Juliet’s sight and only resurfacing twenty minutes before lunch ended, kicking a football around with Simon Price and some of the other boys who weren’t visibly afraid of her and laughing as if she couldn’t feel her girlfriend’s hurt and angry stare boring a hole in her back.

 

            Juliet turned on her heel, long blonde braid whipping out and catching a Year Seven a hefty thump across the face, and marched away. It would have been a flounce, but no Sayers had ever been known to flounce in much the same way no tank has ever been known to prance, and the dramatic effect was almost entirely spoiled by the way that Liz completely ignored her. Juliet told herself she didn’t care.

 

            Juliet steamrollered through the afternoon without being nice to a single person or saying a single unnecessary word, and treated Liz to such a cold shoulder that Simon mumbled something about times of the month, and found himself swearing and hopping away with a seriously bruised shin while she vanished round the next corner, leaving younger children staggering, traumatised, in her imperious wake. Juliet wished she could say that Liz was even the slightest bit concerned, but she didn’t see a single sign of confusion or anxiety on Liz’s face and – by this point – she was something of an expert. Liz _had_ to know why she was behaving this way; Liz had an excellent head for numbers, and there was no _way_ she could have forgotten what today was, or the implications of forgetting. And the fact that Liz hadn’t noticed that she was angry was alarming in and of itself – Liz could be almost paranoid on her girlfriend’s behalf, hypersensitive to anything that might be bothering Juliet, and she should have picked up on Juliet’s anger (was it even anger? Disappointment, maybe? But really virulent disappointment, if that was the case) within mere seconds of walking into the same room.

 

            Basically, Liz was an insensitive twerp, and Juliet was going to make her sorry if it was the last thing she did, and furthermore, if that really weird American girl who’d only joined the school in September had finally succeeded in seducing her, Juliet was going to do something genuinely horrible, maybe to Liz, maybe to Madison, and quite possibly to both of them.

 

            By the time school ended, Juliet had had enough time to embroider the possibility that Liz was going to break up with her for Madison Oppenheimer that Madison was growing quite alarmed by the promise of fiery death in Juliet’s unblinking stare and Juliet was dead certain that Simon’s mildly censorious looks across the Biology classroom did not in fact mean ‘stop scaring Madison witless’ but ‘bloody hell, I can see why Liz wants to dump you’. She was also strongly of the opinion that the moment she got out of classes she was going to start crying, so she went and hid among the reference shelves in the library and wept in plain sight of the dictionary shelf and the more interesting bits of French History rather than the student body. When she thought she’d recovered enough to venture out, she went downstairs to her locker, noting sourly half a tube of Loveheart sweets on the floor. She paused in the eerie emptiness of the mostly-drained school to grind them into the nondescript lino with the heel of her shoe, and went on her way feeling slightly better.

 

            The lockers were battered, ancient, unsecure and – despite the best efforts of the teachers – graffiti-ridden. Today Liam Taunton had a large heart and _Amandeep + Liam_ scrawled over his in board marker. Juliet, mindful of the fact that Liam and Amandeep were friends of Liz and probably knew that Madison and Liz were somewhere off making out right now, not only glowered at the inscription but spat on it; she wasn’t paying attention to the darker corners of the locker room, which was fortunate for the deeper darkness in the shadows, because it meant that she didn’t see it wince.  

 

            Instead, Juliet dropped her bag on the floor, undid her combination lock grumpily and wrenched open her locker door- and gave a piercing shriek as a piece of cardboard fluttered out, hit her face and dropped to the floor. She bent to pick it up, and her heart stuttered in her chest. The deeper darkness tried not to grin at her expression.

 

            It was a card like the one she’d been waiting for all day, plain dark red card with two tiny gold hearts on the front, and Juliet opened it, her breathing unsteady and her heart recovering in order to do what felt like a thousand beats a minute. She knew the scrawl inside off by heart, even if its owner had made painstaking efforts to make it suitable for public consumption, and even if it wasn’t signed (which, considering its content and the sender, was unsurprising). There were faint pencil marks, carefully scrubbed out, which suggested that the card’s message had gone through several incarnations before the author had finally hit on a few simple words that, knowing her, didn’t meet her high standards of perfection and embarrassed her horribly but were the best someone thoroughly unpoetic could come up with.

 

_You make my world spin backwards on its axis, and every room without you in is darker._

 

            Juliet felt the beginnings of tears prick her eyes, and a hand slip up to her mouth. She looked beyond the card, and noticed a plastic container in the back of her locker, on top of an abused copy of _Pride and Prejudice_. She reached out and dragged it gently forward, so that she could see the contents: six red velvet cupcakes, spelling out her name in white icing on top of chocolate buttercream. J U L I E T.

 

            Juliet started to cry in earnest. The deeper darkness looked alarmed and crossed the room, careful not to make any noise, and wrapped its arms around Juliet from behind, shushing her when she jumped like a scalded cat. “Don’t cry,” Liz whispered. “They don’t taste that bad, honest. I made Jon eat one and he not only wasn’t poisoned but ate half the batch and put in an order for his birthday, the greedy little sod.”

 

            “I am not crying,” Juliet informed her, sniffling. “I have dust in my eyes. This is- this- you’re just so _cute_!”

 

            “I’m _not_ ,” Liz said, in tones of mortal embarrassment. Juliet could feel the heat of Liz’s blush against her neck, Liz’s head dipped to rest against hers, her chin sharp on Juliet’s collarbone.

 

            “Are so,” Juliet disagreed. “Oh my God. I thought you _forgot_!”

 

            “O ye of little faith,” Liz mumbled.

 

            Juliet sank an elbow into Liz’s kidneys, eliciting a thoroughly unromantic grunt. “Either that, or you were deliberately ignoring me.”

 

            “I kind of was,” Liz admitted. “I wanted this to be a surprise, you know?” She pressed her lips against Juliet’s cheek. “I’d only have had to say a word, you’d only have had to look at me, and you’d have known something was up.”

 

            “Sneaky like a ninja,” Juliet said, half-admiringly, and turned around to kiss Liz, and then thump her lightly on the chest. “Bitch. You upset me!”

 

            “Ow! All this physical abuse-“

 

            “That’s for making me think you were going to dump me for _Madison Oppenheimer_ ,” Juliet said, and spared a moment to savour Liz’s expression of unfeigned horror before crouching down to fish through her bag. She had almost forgotten about it in the stress of her day, but it was still there, tucked carefully into one of the inside pockets, and when she stood up she had a white envelope in one hand, addressed to Liz in perfect curly handwriting.

 

            Liz looked puzzled, and touched. “You didn’t have t-”  


            “Shut up and open it before I throttle you,” Juliet said lovingly.

 

            Liz grinned and took it from her, opening it carefully and taking out the card. Unlike Liz – whose bent for creativity went as far as swearing and cookery and no further – Juliet had made her own card, simple white card with neat squares of silver and white paper glued on top of each other, getting smaller and smaller until the centre, where a Loveheart sweet had been glued  on top of the last square. It said _love you_ on it.

 

            Liz gave Juliet a distinctly rabbit-caught-in-the-headlights look. Juliet cleared her throat. “I don’t recommend eating it.”

 

            Liz relaxed slightly, and flipped the card open carefully, blunt fingers handling the thing with a delicacy usually reserved for especially fragile glass or Juliet in a bad mood. Juliet’s message was not as concise as Liz’s had been, nor as oblique, and Liz read the whole thing in perfect silence. Juliet would have worried, except for the way that Liz’s face softened as she read, and her lips tilted in the tiniest of smiles, and the strange shyness in Liz’s eyes when she looked up at Juliet again, and, last but not least, the _really awesome_ kiss Liz gave Juliet after she had put the card and the envelope with its still-mysterious burden carefully aside in Juliet’s locker. Entire universes could have ended, nuclear war could have started, anomalies could have surrounded them with glittering danger and the cleaners could have appeared at a really inopportune moment and Liz and Juliet would have been too busy and too blissed-out to notice.   

 

            “You haven’t opened your present yet,” Juliet said reprovingly, trying to get her breath back and turning her face against Liz’s neck, feeling the pulse there flutter under her lips.

 

            “I’m getting there, I’m getting there,” Liz said in a put-upon voice, and Juliet felt her arm shift as she reached out to the locker and pulled out the envelope, removing the remainder of its contents. Juliet shut her eyes and waited for Liz’s reaction.

 

            There was silence for a few seconds as Liz examined the object in her hands, and then a soft, stunned, “Oh, my God.”

 

            “D’you like it?” Juliet couldn’t resist asking.

 

            “It’s brilliant,” Liz said. “I- it’s _brilliant_ ,” and she hugged Juliet tightly. “I remember that day.”

 

            Juliet smiled, and thought of the passport-sized photographs encased in a tiny, camouflage-patterned folding photo-frame, of dragging Liz forcibly into one of those photo-booths months before and messing around in front of the camera, pulling stupid faces and kissing and laughing. She bet Liz hadn’t even realised that Juliet had kept the strip of pictures. “I am brilliant,” she said smugly, and Liz laughed at her.

 

            “C’mon, let’s get back to mine before Dad sends out search parties,” Liz ordered, picking up Juliet’s bag and handing it to her before tucking her card into her own rucksack and the photo-frame into her pocket and turning. “Oh. Er. Hi, Miss Vandermeer.”

 

            Miss Vandermeer was not best known for her serene and gentle temper, or her easygoing attitude to public displays of affection, and Juliet realised from the look on Liz’s face that she had as little idea as Juliet did how long Miss Vandermeer had been standing in the doorway, watching them with that austere expression on her face. She was an excellent physics teacher, but also a total battleaxe. Liz had expressed the opinion that she was a member of a super-secret conspiracy of ninja-trained teachers, demoralising pupils one school at a time by giving them horrible marks in Physics, insane loads of homework, and the frights of their lives by creeping up on them while they were enjoying a good snog behind the bike sheds. Juliet’s C in Physics was a constant source of insecurity to her, and even Liz, who generally breezed through Physics on her aptitude for maths and cavernous memory for equations and other things that actually interested her, was only scraping a B through sheer pig-headed stubbornness.

 

            Juliet really, really wanted to hide behind Liz. Either that or hold her hand. Unfortunately, she strongly suspected that it would do more harm than good.

 

            “Young love,” Miss Vandermeer said in tones that suggested young love could go and jump off Waterloo Bridge for all she cared.

 

            To Juliet’s badly-disguised horror, Liz tilted her chin up arrogantly, looked Miss Vandermeer in the eye, and said “Yes, miss.”

 

            Miss Vandermeer’s expression remained frosty, and she pointed one glacial finger out of the door, in the general direction of the exit. Liz evidently took the hint, as she grabbed Juliet’s hand  and towed her out of the room, throwing a hurried but mannerly “Have a nice evening, miss,” over her shoulder.

 

            They got halfway up the stairs before Miss Vandermeer called after them. “Juliet. Elizabeth.”

 

            They both halted. Juliet gulped, and turned, hand still clasped in Liz’s. “Yes, Miss Vandermeer?”

 

            Miss Vandermeer cracked a thin smile. “Happy Valentine’s Day.”

 

 

 


End file.
